I recently sat down for an extended hands-on with the first three hours of Silent Hill 2, the upcoming remake of the seminal survival horror classic helmed by developer Bloober Team. Venturing back into the mysterious town of Silent Hill as protagonist James Sunderland, there was a lot to like in what I saw.
The world of the 2001 title has been painstakingly recreated in absolutely stunning detail. From the opening scene where James arrives at the outskirts of the town to the derelict rooms of the Wood Side Apartments building, everything is simply beautiful to behold. Although graphically overhauled, the foreboding, somber atmosphere of the initial release is completely intact. Thick fog obscures the abandoned streets, sparsely populated by shuffling horrors and the occasional rotting corpse that looks suspiciously reminiscent of our protagonist.
Sound design is near perfect too: a subtle mix of unsettling environmental sounds, distant moans, and a tastefully reworked soundtrack. Bloober Team has always excelled at delivering wonderfully realized settings and it’s clear that Silent Hill 2 will be no exception.
Restless dreams
While this is very promising, this remake of Silent Hill 2 still has some big boots to fill. Eager to find out what it takes to recreate one of the best horror games of all time, I sat down with lead producer Marciej Glomb and lead designer Mateusz Lenart to discover how Bloober Team is dealing with the heavy weight of fan expectations.
“I think that the common misconception – and I would call it a misconception – is that the pressure is coming from the fans, from the original players, and is the hardest thing to deal with. But I would say that actually, the strongest pressure is from within the team because we are all fans of the original game and we want to create as good as we can,” Glomb explains. “I can easily see a scenario where, if we weren’t the studio remaking Silent Hill 2, we would be the first on the forums, checking all the info about it, all the news and the leaks. It was super important for us from the beginning that we always required the best from the results that we were achieving.
“I would say that our goal was never to compete with the original, we didn’t want to just do it one to one exactly in the same manner. We want to reimagine the original game and give it our own Bloober spin at the same time,” he continues. “People usually tend to remember some specific parts or some feelings that they felt when they played. They don’t tend to remember all the locations, all the little corridors or puzzles, so we wanted players to feel like they played the original, even though the game is different in many ways.“
“We knew from the very beginning that we are dealing with the memory of the original game, not necessarily every single aspect of it,” Lenart adds. “At the same time, we are trying as hard as possible to keep all of the details from the original game, and twist them and expand on those ideas to make the game interesting for the newcomers but also for long time fans of the series.”
Updated, overhauled
Although the portions of Silent Hill 2 that I explored seemed faithful to the original, or at least my hazy memories of it, Bloober Team intends to expand the game somewhat through new content such as additional endings. “Obviously it varies in the different sections of the game, because in terms of the story, we want to keep the original themes, original reveals, original arcs of the characters intact,” says Lenart, “but in terms of the gameplay, in terms of the mechanics, we obviously needed to improve on specific things to make the game more approachable, and especially in terms of controls […] combat systems and stuff like that.”
It was in these new systems that I noticed the most apparent rough edges, however. The overall shift from a fixed camera position to an over-the-shoulder perspective is accomplished well and seems like a smart move given the success of other survival horror remakes like Resident Evil 2, but it does draw attention to the slightly jagged combat. James can dodge enemy attacks, though the canned animation is unwieldy and looks unnatural. The same can be said of his melee attacks, which each cause the camera to shake in an uncomfortable fashion. Gunplay was little better and, armed with a pistol a short while into my play session, every shot felt weak and frankly quite underwhelming.
Another area where the studio seems to have departed from the source material is in the remake’s character designs, which have received some tweaks. Given the iconic status of the original incarnations of these characters, I was curious to find out the reasons behind this decision. Lenart explains that “the characters, from the very beginning, were very important for us and for Konami and for Masahiro Ito, who is the original creator and art director of the original game.
We’re still creating a remake, so it’s an opportunity to reimagine things, sometimes in the way that even the original creators thought might be even better.
“His input on those topics was probably the most important thing for us at the very beginning. We had a lot of talks with him about the characters’ backstory, about what those characters actually are, to portray them in the best possible way. We also did a lot of research by ourselves with Konami, like searching for old concept art for Angela, for Maria, and trying to portray even some unfinished visions from the original creators that were […] never put into production.
“We’re still creating a remake, so it’s an opportunity to reimagine things, sometimes in a way that even the original creators thought might be even better. But we want to reassure [fans] that it’s definitely not like we are changing the personality of the characters. The arcs need to be the same. We understand the background of the story of all of those characters, and we are even enriching them, in a way.”
As for what exactly this entails, it seems as though we will have to wait and see. Silent Hill 2 is set to release on October 8 and is coming to PC and PlayStation 5. Physical and digital pre-orders for the upcoming game are available now.